Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West

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More About This Book

Overview


In late October 1846, the last wagon train of that year's westward migration stopped overnight before resuming its arduous climb over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, unaware that a fearsome storm was gathering force. After months of grueling travel, the 81 men, women and children would be trapped for a brutal winter with little food and only primitive shelter. The conclusion is known: by spring of the next year, the Donner Party was synonymous with the most harrowing extremes of human survival. But until now, the full story of what happened--and what it tells us about human nature and about America's westward expansion--remained shrouded in myth.
Drawing on fresh archeological evidence, recent research on topics ranging from survival rates to snowfall totals, and heartbreaking letters and diaries made public by descendants a century-and-a-half after the tragedy, Ethan Rarick offers an intimate portrait of the Donner party and their unimaginable ordeal: a mother who must divide her family, a little girl who shines with courage, a devoted wife who refuses to abandon her husband, a man who risks his life merely to keep his word. Rarick resists both the gruesomely sensationalist accounts of the Donner party as well as later attempts to turn the survivors into archetypal pioneer heroes. "The Donner Party," Rarick writes, "is a story of hard decisions that were neither heroic nor villainous. Often, the emigrants displayed a more realistic and typically human mixture of generosity and selfishness, an alloy born of necessity."
A fast-paced, heart-wrenching, clear-eyed narrative history, Desperate Passage casts new light on one of America's most horrific encounters between the dream of a better life and the harsh realities such dreams so often must confront.

Editorial Reviews

Dana Goodyear
Rarick's account is not really about science; it is about humanity, and his major contribution is his choice to focus on the Reed family. In most tellings, the Donners, for obvious reasons, are at the emotional center of the story. Rarick, instead, finds a greater dramatic vehicle in James Reed—"a man with a full head of hair and a bit of a smirk and iron convictions, others be damned"—who traveled with his wife, Margret; her mother (she died on the trail); and four children…Rarick has done his homework—visiting the many archives where primary-source records are available, skillfully synthesizing that great body of material and even traveling the Donner party route himself. His approach to the many conflicting and contradictory accounts is conciliatory.
—The New York Times

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780195383317
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
  • Publication date: 7/8/2009
  • Pages: 304
  • Sales rank: 142,786
  • Product dimensions: 6.10 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 0.90 (d)

Meet the Author

Ethan Rarick has written about politics, crime, business and sports throughout the West. His work has appeared in many publications, including the Los Angles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, and he is the author of California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Table of Contents

List of Characters x

Prologue 1

I Journey 5

II Tribulation 103

III Salvation 161

Author's Note 247

Acknowledgments 250

Notes 251

Selected Bibliography 273

Index 280

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4.5
( 16 )

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Sort by: Showing all of 16 Customer Reviews

  • Posted December 22, 2011

    Highly recommended!

    I've read a lot about the Donner Party and this is the definitive book on their journey. I especially liked the 'realistic' comparisons as to what these folk went through. Brougt it all home to a reader of this century. Every American should read this book.
    DebraE

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  • Posted August 29, 2011

    AWESOME!

    This is a great all around book! Wonderfully written with accounts of those who traveled the trail, great book for anyone wanting to learn the truth about the Donner Party and life on the California Trail! Great Book!!!

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 10, 2010

    Highly Recommended

    After reading several Donner Party books, this is the best so far. Sticks as close to the known facts as possible relying on every source available. Wonderful reading non-fiction for American history buffs.

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  • Posted April 10, 2010

    I Also Recommend:

    9781409763567

    WELL DONE

    This book starts off slowly, just as the wagon party forms and begins its journey from Independence, Mo. Rarick takes the reader through the prairie as the Donner Party endures the heat, the loss of livestock, the deaths along the way. Once the party became stuck in the Sierra Nevada mountains during the coldest winter on record, the many deaths occurred one after another, leaving many of the families with just one or two members alive.
    This is a well-researched book that has the advantage over older versions of this tragedy because of recent testings of bones found at the campsite. Rarick also goes beyond the events that made the party famous and gives accounts of what happened to the survivors years and even decades after.

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  • Posted December 15, 2009

    more from this reviewer

    I Also Recommend:

    9780060572006 9780141001821 9780762740048

    The Donner Party Tragedy

    I've learned very little about the Donner Party through out my school years. In fact all I knew about it was that they were a large wagon party that split somewhere in the Midwest and the half that went more the southern straight route were struck by cannibalism. Most people when hearing about the Donner Party and the fate that struck them think the most barbarious things that usually are involved with cannibalism. I never thought like that because I had a clear memory of what little it was that I learned about that party and its fate in school. Rarick does a great job, in so many ways, disecting cannibalism through out human history and how and why it grasped the hold of the Donner Party, or likely why they fell to such a fate, how the human psychology deals with it as it did with the survivors of the Donner Party. I highly recommand this book to all those who love U.S. History (and who have strong stomachs) to read this book.

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